“HARAJUKU'S CHANGED in the last couple of years,” Helen said, as they headed out of the station.
Sam started to ask why and stopped. The area in front of the ticket machines was an ocean of idlers, clusters of men standing shoulder to shoulder. None were Japanese. Outside the confines of the station, they overflowed the sidewalks and into the street. Thousands were converging, milling and massing in Yoyogikoen.
“They call it Little Teheran,” Helen explained.
“Yaaaada,” Kiyomi said.
“Yaaaada,” May echoed. It was a word used to exhaustion by teenage girls. It meant: yucky, nasty, no way (I’m going to do that) and gross.
“Is it like this all the time?” Sam asked.
Helen nodded. “Yeah, and Sundays are the worst.”
The men had dark eyes, dark hair and white faces—east and west, somewhere in the middle. They wore Jordan and Ewing sneakers, designer jeans and brown leather jackets. Sam looked down. At least his jacket was black. He smiled—he’d always wanted to fit in somewhere, anywhere. Now he wasn’t so sure.
There was an unwelcome roughness to the crowd, they blocked the ticket wickets without concern. They gaped at the women, pointed and snapped their fingers; they stood in a threatening mass, dangerous and too foreign for Japanese eyes.
Sam watched May edge toward Helen and Kiyomi’s nervous smile as they started through the crowd. He took the girls by the hand and left Helen to fend for herself.
Teenage girls, not much older than May, fought against the exiting tide, trying to get into the station. They held their tickets out like talismans, almost swaying in their indecision and reluctance. Too many voices, loud in a box of concrete and tile, hummed like a machine.
They took a deep breath and dove in. It was impossible to avoid the gangs of leering men who leaned toward their shoulders and arms, hoping to touch as much as possible. Deep in the crowd, hands were anonymous and brazen. They stroked the hips of terrified girls.
One tall man stepped in front of a teenager and spoke in English. “You be my girlfriend, you be girlfriend.” He grabbed her arm and she shook him off. He didn’t stop, he tried to maneuver her away from the gate, like a cowboy cutting a heifer from the herd. She was a small girl and very scared as he kept bumping her with his shoulder.
She lowered her eyes and pushed forward. Occupied with the man on her right, she could do nothing about the lewd comments or the hands that grabbed her from the left. She escaped through the wicket and ran for the trains.
Helen led the girls away from the station. Sam followed, remembering the days when you could walk halfway across the city and never see another gaijin.
Half a dozen rock ‘n’ roll bands were playing side-by-side in a tree-shaded street just inside the park. “They used to have more space,” May said. “The Iran-jins stole their spots.”
“And the Iran-jins sell drugs to kids,” Kiyomi accused.
“How do you know?” Sam asked
“I saw it on TV.”
The rockers looked lost, overwhelmed by thousands of foreigners. They played as loud as possible, trying to defend their shrinking turf with Marshall amps and squeaky off-key lyrics.
Nobody cared if the bands were lousy, their enthusiasm made up for any lack of skill. Each band had its groupies, boys and girls sitting on the curb in pink chiffon and rainbow-colored hair. They turned their faces to the sun and bobbed their heads to the beat, ignoring rival bands and gaijin intruders.
Sam was surprised when May and Kiyomi let Helen lead them away from the music in the direction of Meiji Jingu shrine. His stomach growled and he remembered Helen was carrying food in her backpack. The girls weren’t being obedient—that was too much to expect—they were just hungry.
The crowd thinned as they walked deeper into the park and Helen found an isolated spot on a rise overlooking a pond. She handed sandwiches and Cokes to the girls and lit a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Sam said.
“I don’t. This doesn’t count. That station always makes me nervous. It’s always like this when the weather’s good. Ueno’s the same, just not as bad.”
May and Kiyomi ignored her and began to hungrily divide up a bowl of potato salad.
“Leave some for us,” Helen snapped.
May groaned and put a few spoonfuls back in the bowl. Kiyomi added a couple more. They giggled, started to eat, and giggled some more.
Helen snubbed out her cigarette. “What’s so funny?”
“Grouchy?” Kiyomi smiled, trying out a new word.
Helen reached for a beer. The pull-ring wouldn’t cooperate and she snapped it off leaving the can impossible to open. “Son of a bitch.” She tossed it aside and opened a second more carefully.
May and Kiyomi were frozen in mid-bite, staring. They’d never seen Helen angry or even very excited. Long ago, they’d decided she was more Japanese than they. The idea that she could lose her temper was startling and a little exciting.
“If you two don’t stopped staring at me I won’t play in your weird little band,” she threatened.
The girls ducked their heads and whispered. “So you’re gonna do it?” May asked.
Helen lay back on the grass and closed her eyes. “Why not? It should be memorable.”
“Don’t worry, Sam’s gonna pay you just the same as us,” May promised.
Helen had one arm over her eyes blocking the sun. “No, he’s not.. I have a job. I play for free or I don’t play at all.”
Sam tossed a couple of Snickers bars at May and Kiyomi. “How much are you girls going to cost me?”
The kids put their heads together for a hurried consultation. “We want a thousand yen an hour. That’s not too much, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Sam laughed. “You’ll be the cheapest band in Tokyo.”
A couple of gaijins, young and noisy enough to be American, were playing Frisbee on the grass. A cop stopped his clunky black bicycle on a path to watch. The Frisbee was tossed in his direction in a friendly fashion. He dismounted and returned it to the players. They stopped smiling and handed over their alien registration cards as ordered. The cop got back on his bike and watched as they walked toward the park exit.
Sam was pleased Helen was going to play in May’s band and relieved she’d refused payment. He didn’t want her as an employee, however informal. Things were too complicated as it was.
During the plane ride to Tokyo, when the lights had been low and the flight attendants had napped, he’d curled up in two seats and worried. His fears had covered the broadest spectrum, ranging from death by earthquake to a loveless, lonely old age.
He’d given himself a headache but accomplished little else. A flight attendant had rubbed her eyes and given him aspirin. The plane had landed without crashing into Tokyo Bay and he’d slogged through customs feeling oppressed and panicky, paying for his forgetfulness.
Will I never remember? he’d wondered, standing aside for a battalion of boys and girls carrying skis and poles like rifles. Probably not. Not when it’s so easy to forget and scare yourself. To forget to practice to remember to absolutely trust in the simplest things. That we will fail—sometimes the best of intentions are all that we can manage. That truth is black and white—look deep, close to the bone. And that effort counts most of all.
What about Helen? He watched her nap and listened to the kids prattle on. They never stopped talking, she didn’t seem to say enough. Last night, he’d carried the conversation, entertaining her with the best stories of his life. She’d offered a few of her own but had seem happiest when listening.
Encouraged by her attentiveness and nearness, Sam had leaned closer. Slowly, she’d relaxed and put some space between herself and the murder that afternoon. He’d watched carefully for signs of interest, a lift of the chin, a casual touch. But the only flirting had been his own.
Like a con man, he’d fed her insubstantial bits of intimacy, hoping she’d slip and trade away something vital. Helen hadn’t been fooled but she hadn’t objected, either. She’d listened with a half-smile, seemingly content to hear it all again.
Sam had carried on, and if anyone had observed that he wasn’t thinking very far ahead, they would have been right. Desire preempted thought and action became a means to an end ill-considered. His expectations of Helen were based on his experience, not hers.
At the end, sometime after dinner and May had gone to bed, Helen had changed the music on the jukebox and the subject under discussion. Slowly, she’d finished her beer and talked vaguely about Australia. Sam had nodded his head. It had been more of an act than real understanding—she was quite beautiful and her perfume just so sweet. Finished with her story, she’d shrugged and smiled—it was, after all, still early, and Sam forgivable.
Helen had stood up and said good night. Just past one-thirty in the morning, she’d placed her hand on his shoulder and said, “I don’t have very many friends, you know.”
May began to chirp. “Can we leave? Sitting here is really boring.” She stood up with Kiyomi by her side, waiting for permission to abandon the picnic.
Sam didn’t mind the girls’ desertion, he welcomed it. He couldn’t talk to Helen with his sister nearby. May’s ears turned pink at even the hint of romance. She snickered at pretense.
He tried to think of protective questions but he knew May had him at a disadvantage. She was an experienced adolescent while he was only a novice parent.
“Where are you going?”
“Shopping.”
A direct answer but wouldn’t a proper parent require more?
“Shopping where?”
May looked at him as if he’d just stepped off a DC-3 from Ulan Bator. “Takeshitadori, of course.”
Sam nodded. Takeshitadori was the main drag in Harajuku and considered trendy heaven by Tokyo’s hippest teen bunnies. “Do you want us to go with you?”
Helen laughed, and May and Kiyomi didn’t even bother to respond.
He tried again. “When will you be back?”
The girls conferred. “Can we meet you at home?”
They rode the train alone nearly every day of their lives. It was a reasonable request. “OK, but don’t talk to strangers and be home before dark.” Good. That sounded like something a parent would say. He sat back pleased with himself.
May and Kiyomi agreed, gathered up their things and headed off.
“Wait,” Sam shouted. “What about money?” He’d borrowed all of May’s cash to loan to Manny.
“I’ve got nine-hundred yen,” May said, counting her change.
“How can you go shopping with nine-hundred yen? You can’t buy anything with that.”
“We don’t have to buy anything to go shopping. We just look at stuff. Besides if I see something I really like...”
May paused to reconsider and Kiyomi tried to help. “What she means is that if there’s some horrible emergency—”
May nodded. “Yeah, like if we get hurt or something, uhh, we can always, uhh...”
Sam turned to Helen. “What are they talking about?”
She laughed again. “Credit cards.”
“But they’re only thirteen.”
May put her arm over Kiyomi’s shoulder. “We’re very mature.”
Thinking Sam’s Japanese was rusty and leading to confusion, Kiyomi tried to switch the conversation to English. “And we are...” She searched through a compact dictionary pulled from her bag. She found the word she was looking for and grinned. “And we’re, uhh, spoiled!”
“Wrong word! Wrong word!” May clapped her hand over her friend’s mouth and the kids fell to the ground laughing.
Helen watched a soft breeze ripple the surface of the pond, listened to voices echo in the woods and did her best to talk to Sam. It wasn’t easy, she was out of practice. She tried to remember how to hold a conversation with a man. It had been so long, she seemed to have forgotten how to deflect personal questions.
She was both disappointed and relieved when he gave up. They lay side by side with their eyes closed, letting the sun warm their faces. Helen would have liked to tell him to ignore her hesitancy and the distracted look in her eyes. Keep talking, I like to listen. I’m sorry I’m so quiet, I wasn’t always this way. Keep talking, tell me stories, make me laugh. I know it seems unfair, an uneven trade. But most men will hurt you if you give them half a chance, if you tell them anything at all.
The one in Ottawa certainly had. It had been her first job, her first newspaper. Just a smart kid straight out of college, she’d believed in the nobility of the fourth estate and the invulnerability of her heart. He’d destroyed both illusions and then left for Japan.
Even today, years later, she was ashamed she’d jumped, almost leaped across the water, when he’d snapped his fingers. Lonely and selfish, he’d recalled her to his side. The power to summons and then exhibit her in Tokyo had soon revived his strength. When he’d left again, he’d told her she was tough and could take care of herself.
For once he’d been right, and when she’d received his sad needful letter from Prague she’d tossed it in the garbage. The next few years, first teaching English and then working for the Sun had been good. Tokyo had treated her well, it had been exciting and had always retained its capacity to surprise.
Men had been merely an adjunct to her life. She’d circled the wagons with her women friends, occasionally forgot her earrings in strange apartments and told herself she’d learned all life’s lessons. Later, growing cynical and tired of losing her jewelry, she’d given up on strange apartments entirely—men either came to her or they didn’t come at all.
Sometimes she’d cooked them breakfast, sometimes she’d kicked them out. But she always slept in her own bed and used her own shower, soap and shampoo. Never again, she’d vowed, would Irish Spring, Coast, or soap-on-a-rope touch her skin.
On her twenty-sixth birthday Helen had discovered she was safe and secure. By the next day this independence and serenity had begun to wear thin. Weeks passed and each day she became more and more convinced that she’d outgrown love. Thus frightened, she impaled herself on the first man suitably abusive. She’d called John’s appearance in the newsroom fate. But the only thing preordained was Helen’s calculated, desperate decision to love.
Within a week she was congratulating herself on the depth of her passion and within a month on how bad she hurt. She cried bitterly over his innumerable cruelties and waited eagerly for the next. John followed Helen’s script without difficulty. It was, after all, one he was familiar with. He wasn’t much of a writer, not much of an editor, but at least he could make women feel bad. That, too, wasn’t much, but it made him feel better than being nothing at all.
Helen was obsessed. She wallowed in her martyrdom and her work suffered. Her friends tried to help but she took offense at what she saw as plots and condescension. By the time John vanished into Australia, Helen was isolated and alienated from her friends and herself.
Two years had passed since his departure, and just as she’d once doubted her ability to feel anything at all, Helen was now less convinced of the purity of unrequited love. At first, she’d tracked his movements across Australia like a Bushman. Mutual friends had provided what little information they could. Some had resented being used, others had been concerned by Helen’s prolonged depression.
Slowly, in increments unnoticed or vehemently denied—her love would last forever—his trail had grown cold. No longer could she go to bed and pull his perfidious nature over her head like a warm comforter. Ungrateful for the healing, she’d fought and scrabbled as he’d disappeared into the outback of her heart.
She sat up, looked over Minami pond and down at Sam still sleeping. He wasn’t the same, she knew that already. Conversation with John had ultimately been mutual lamentation—they’d cried over their repetitive sins and shivered together in self-pity.
She’d met Sam three days ago and she already knew more about him that she’d ever learned about John. They’d actually held a normal funny amusing conversation, an activity impossible when perched on a needle-point of self-absorption.
Sam opened his eyes and looked up, as if happy and surprised to see she was still there. Yes, he was different. It was reassuring that his ability to lie and cheat seemed quite limited, but also less exciting. He asked if she wanted to go for a walk and Helen agreed. True, men couldn’t be trusted, she had the scars to prove it, but what about herself?
